Making Suburbia

New Histories of Everyday America

The stereotypical portrayal of the suburbs as a boring, homogeneous, and alienating place tells us very little about the lives of the people who actually live there. Making Suburbia offers a diverse collection of essays that examine how the history and landscape of the American suburb are constructed through the everyday actions and experiences of its inhabitants.

Contributors attempt to remove stereotypes-- plenty are called out-- and to legitimate suburbs as a field of study. The topics covered here might fall into several fields ranging from sociology to urban planning, remain peripheral to them, or provoke further investigation.

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What are the suburbs? The popular vision of monotonous streets curving into culs-de-sac and emerald lawns unfurling from nearly identical houses would have us believe that suburbia is a boring, homogeneous, and alienating place. But this stereotypical portrayal of the suburbs tells us very little about the lives of the people who actually live there. Making Suburbia offers a diverse collection of essays that examine how the history and landscape of the American suburb are constructed through the everyday actions and experiences of its inhabitants.

From home decor and garage rock to modernist shopping malls and holiday parades, contributors explore how suburbanites actively created the spaces of suburbia. The volume is divided into four parts, each of which addresses a distinct aspect of the ways in which suburbia is lived in and made. More than twenty essays range from Becky Nicolaides’s chronicle of cross-racial alliances in Pasadena, to Jodi Rios’s investigation of St. Louis residents’ debates over public space and behavior, to Andrew Friedman’s story of Cold War double agents who used the suburban milieu as a cover for their espionage.

Presenting a wide variety of voices, Making Suburbia reveals that suburbs are a constantly evolving landscape for the articulation of American society and are ultimately defined not by planners but by their inhabitants.

John Archer, professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, is author of Architecture and Suburbia and The Literature of British Domestic Architecture, 1715–1842.

Margaret Crawford is professor of architecture at University of California, Berkeley.

Katherine Solomonson is associate professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s.

Paul J. P. Sandul is assistant professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the author of California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State.

Contributors attempt to remove stereotypes-- plenty are called out-- and to legitimate suburbs as a field of study. The topics covered here might fall into several fields ranging from sociology to urban planning, remain peripheral to them, or provoke further investigation.

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CHOICE

The book succeeds in demolishing the single sterile stereotype of suburbia.

Architecture and SuburbiaFrom English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000
An illustrated cultural history of the residential landscape of suburbia

Little White HousesHow the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America
How the ordinary American house contributed to definitions of middle-class whiteness and an exclusionary housing market in the postwar era

Sprawl and SuburbiaA Harvard Design Magazine Reader
Combating sprawl through alternative visions of design and community

Pedestrian ModernShopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956
How the design of stores and shopping centers shaped modern architecture in the United States